One of our big drives over the last eighteen months has been to develop and improve home-school links, and to support that we've tried hard to provide more suggestions, resources and guidance to support home learning. Below you will find a list of school-wide approaches that we use (along with links to all the relevant sites and portals), while further down the page you will find class-specific information, linked to current topics and learning:

• Children in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 all have daily phonics sessions. We follow the ReadWriteInc scheme, and they have lots of guidance on how you can support your child with phonics at home here.  
• Nursery and Reception use Tapestry to share work that children have done in school and share ideas for learning beyond school. Again, speak to your child's teacher if you're not sure about how to log in. 
• Children in Years 2-6 bring home weekly spellings to learn - these are drawn from a combination of spelling patterns that children are working on in class and common exception words (which do not fit regular patterns) for their age group. Click here for guidance on useful strategies you can use to support your child in learning their spellings.  
• Keeping fit, happy and healthy is always important. There are links to lots of great resources and workouts to help everyone in the family get active at www.sportengland.org/get-moving
• Finally, one of the simplest and most powerful ways you can support your child's learning every day is by hearing them read and reading to them. Our guide on how to make the most of this is available here.   

Years 1 and 2

• Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice. 
• It’s Safer Internet Day on February 10th, so this is a good opportunity for us all to talk about the way that we stay safe online. This year’s focus is on learning to use AI safely - you can find out more at saferinternet.org.uk/
• Explore some of our local habitats and see what different living things you can find there - what differences can you see between the park, woodland, back gardens and farmers fields? What things do the animals that live in these places eat? How do they keep themselves safe? Which of them would be happy living in your garden?
  
• Talk about the way the world around us changes with the seasons - what happens to plants, trees and animals as the weather gets colder? How do different animals handle the cold?    
• Practice reciting the days of the week and months of the year in order - saying them is great; learning to spell a few of them would be even better! 

Years 3 and 4

• Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
• In geography this term we are learning about the USA. There are loads of resources online to help you find out more about the climate, people, landmarks and landscapes found across this enormous country - a good place to start is the BBC Bitesize website, where there’s a unit focussing on Florida which you can find here.
• Go on a rock hunt in the garden or around town. What different types can you find? Can you spot any of the rocks we’ve met in class (like chalk, slate, granite and marble)? Can you tell if they are igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic?
• Later in the term we will be exploring newspaper reports, so reading and sharing examples at home would be really helpful. Does the report tell you who, what, when and where and why? Why do you think the editor chose to run this story first? What differences can you spot between newspapers?
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/ keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/ 
• Keep learning times tables facts - in Year 3, 2x, 10x, 5x and then 3x tables would be a great place to start. In Year 4, we're aiming to know all our facts by heart by the end of the year.